"Incredibly ambitious. An amazing integration of multiple digital touchpoints that empowers creativity and gives control to its audience while looking beyond the browser." —juror Michael Lebowitz

"Impressive consistency between online and off, brings the experience of customization into the physical world." —juror Liz Danzico

Overview: In a notable reversal, NikeiD Studio takes the highly-successful NikeiD online experience, that enables customers to design and customize Nike shoes and products, and translates it for Niketown stores in New York and London. The look-and-feel is high-end boutique with personal design consultants that help customers create perfect products with design options and exclusive materials not available online. Interactive tools and digital displays immerse the customers in the brand and bring the virtual experience to life, and a credit-card-like takeaway, featuring a high-res image of their design and details of the colors and materials, helps them to bide the time between designing and receiving the products.

• Development time was approximately eleven months.• Built in Flash client side with an ATG back end utilizing Nanonation kiosk software and Scene7 dynamic image creation.• A digital appointment system in the waiting area displayed designs as they were being created and signaled customers next in line.

Comments by Robert Rassmussen and Daniel Jurow: How did this project compare with others you've worked on in the past? "NikeiD was created as a digital experience. So even though we were bringing it into a physical environment, we deliberately set out to keep it inherently digital. We asked ourselves, 'How do we transfer the energy of NikeiD into retail?' and 'How do we make this as fun as possible?' Additionally, we wanted to maintain the community aspect of the experience, so seeing lots of designs from lots of different users in the signage was important.

"We'd done a lot of retail installation work, but never with such unexpected challenges. For instance, we decided to create a touchscreen experience; it was an impressive obstacle. It needed to work through tinted, coated, 1.5 inch-thick bulletproof glass, yet feel as immediate as an iPhone in your hand.

"We found a software-controlled capacitive foil that can sense touch through more than an inch of glass. We painstakingly put up the film only to discover that it wouldn’t calibrate properly. After getting a very precise laser guide to measure the glass, we realized it was nearly 1/2 inch over tolerance. The vendor flew out to help set it up, and after carefully grounding the device and fine-tuning the sensitivity, the screen reacted to touch as if the glass weren’t there at all.

"The window touchscreens highlighted the global online community of users, featuring designs created in real-time from around the world, along with information on when and where they were designed. This inspired passersby to create designs themselves. After completing them, people could e-mail their creations or go inside Niketown to finish and purchase them."